Directing the Dance Legacy of Doris Humphrey

The Creative Impulse of Reconstruction

Looks inside four of Doris Humphrey’s major choreographic works - Water Study, The Shakers, With My Red Fires, and Passacaglia -with an eye to how directorial strategies applied in recent contemporised stagings could work across the modern and contemporary dance genre. Lesley Main stresses to the reader the need to balance respect for classical works from the modern dance repertory with the necessity for fresh directorial strategies, to balance between traditional practices and a creative role for the reconstructor.

Directing the Dance Legacy of Doris Humphrey looks inside four of Doris Humphrey's major choreographic works - Water Study (1928), The Shakers (1931), With My Red Fires (1936), and Passacaglia (1938) - with an eye to how directorial strategies applied in recent contemporized stagings in the United States and Europe could work across the modern and contemporary dance genre. Author Lesley Main, a seasoned practitioner of Doris Humphrey choreography, stresses to the reader the need to balance respect for classical works from the modern dance repertory with the necessity for fresh directorial strategies, to balance between traditional practices and a creative role for the reconstructor. Drawing upon her own dance experience, Main's book addresses an area of dance research and practice that is becoming increasingly pertinent as the dancer-choreographers of the 20th century modern and contemporary dance are no longer alive to attend to the re-stagings of the body of their works. Insightful and thought-provoking, Directing the Dance Legacy of Doris Humphrey calls for the creation of new forms of directorial practice in dance beyond reconstruction. The radical new practices it proposes to replace the old are sure to spark debate and fresh thinking across the dance field.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Prologue: Negotiating a Living Past Part One Chasing the Ephemeral Part Two Exploring the Creative Impulse Water Study Passacaglia With My Red Fires The Shakers Epilogue: Dancing the Past Tomorrow Notes Bibliography Index

Lesley Main is a leading European exponent of Doris Humphrey's dance tradition, director of the Doris Humphrey Foundation UK, and principal lecturer on dance at Middlesex University.

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